Commercial Building Energy Saver

Commercial Building Energy Saver (CBES), intended use for small and medium office and retail buildings in California, provides energy benchmarking and three levels of retrofit analysis considering the project goal, data availability, and user experience. CBES offers prototype building models for seven building types, six vintages, in 16 California climate zones and roughly 100 energy conservation measures (ECMs) for lighting, envelope, equipment, HVAC, and service hot water retrofit upgrades. CBES Preliminary Retrofit Analysis utilizes the DEEP database, a data bank for screening and evaluating retrofit measures for commercial buildings generated from 10 million building energy simulations conducted using EnergyPlus and the U.S. National Energy Research Scientific Computing (NERSC) supercomputer. CBES Detailed Retrofit Analysis employs advanced automated calibration algorithms to attune inputs prior to simulating energy savings of ECMs. For the detailed retrofit analysis, on-demand energy simulations using OpenStudio and EnergyPlus calculates the energy performance of the building with user configurable ECMs. CBES is flexible enough that the user can jump to any level of evaluation, after the common inputs are provided. For those who wish to extend beyond California, a national version can be found at the 2030 whole building retrofit toolkit portal. CBES targets broad audience including building owners, facility managers, energy managers, building operators, energy auditors, designers, engineers and consultants. Recent new features include ECMs, PV, and battery to support ZNE buildings design and retrofits.

Expertise Required:

User skill includes beginner to advanced, with different packages tailored to skill level.

The CBES toolkit is one of the most comprehensive toolkit available for the retrofit of small and medium commercial buildings. It is unique in that it provides flexibility giving results dependent upon data availability and user experience. This tool is also one of the few tools to use real energy data coupled with auto-model calibration to bring simulation results closer to actual building performance.

Reviews

Very useful and practical software in energy saving. I'm not real building owner or occupier, but I used this soft as scholar. It could offer recommendations for the energy efficient retrofit, such as costs, benefits and etc. I think this can improve the analysis of green retrofit both in academia and industry.